The Man Without a Past

The Man Without a Past (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2002) is a Finnish film about a man (M, played by Markku Peltola) who suffers a terrible beating, loses his memory, and remakes his life. It is the first Finnish film I’ve seen. It is quietly, strangely funny.

Is there something deeply Finnish about the film’s dark, awkward humor? My guess is yes . The Man Without a Past reminds me of Robert Bresson (whom Kaurismäki acknowledges as an influence on his work) and, of all things, Napoleon Dynamite (dir. Jared Hess, 2004). The sprawling subdivision of Kaurismäki Heights is now part of our Netflix queue.

Thanks to Fresca, who seems to be an infallible recommender of films.

Michael Oakeshott on education, again

One more passage:

Education, I have contended, is the transaction between the generations in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world which they are to inhabit. This is a world of understandings, imaginings, meanings, moral and religious beliefs, relationships, practices — states of mind in which the human condition is to be discerned as recognitions of and responses to the ordeal of consciousness. These states of mind can be entered into only by being themselves understood, and they can be understood only by learning to do so. To be initiated into this world is learning to become human; and to move within it freely is being human, which is a “historic,” not a “natural” condition.

Thus, an educational engagement is at once a discipline and a release; and it is the one by virtue of being the other. It is a difficult engagement of learning by study in a continuous and exacting redirection of attention and refinement of understanding which calls for humility, patience and courage. Its reward is an emancipation from the mere “fact of living,” from the immediate contingencies of place and time of birth, from the tyranny of the moment and from the servitude of a merely current condition; it is the reward of a human identity and of a character capable in some measure of the moral and intellectual adventure which constitutes a specifically human life.

“Education: The Engagement and Its Frustration” (1972), in The Voice of Liberal Learning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

I like that characterization of children as “newcomers to the scene.” And I’m inspired by just about everything this essay says about education.

Two more Michael Oakeshott posts
On education: being and becoming human
On higher education

Michael Oakeshott on education: being and becoming human

The marks of a good school are that in it learning may be recognized as, itself, a golden satisfaction which needs no adventitious gilding to recommend it; and that it bestows upon its alumni the gift of a childhood recollected, not as a passage of time hurried through on the way to more profitable engagements, but, with gratitude, as an enjoyed initiation into the mysteries of a human condition: the gift of self-knowledge and of a satisfying intellectual and moral identity.

Thus, this transaction between the generations cannot be said to have any extrinsic “end” or “purpose”: for the teacher it is part of his engagement of being human; for the learner it is the engagement of becoming human. It does not equip the newcomer to do anything specific; it gives him no particular skill, it promises no material advantage over other men, and it points to no finally perfect human character. Each, in participating in this transaction, takes in keeping some small or large part of an inheritance of human understandings. . . . Education is not learning to do this or that more proficiently; it is acquiring in some measure an understanding of a human condition in which the “fact of life” is continuously illuminated by a “quality of life.” It is learning how to be at once an autonomous and a civilized subscriber to a human life.

“Education: The Engagement and Its Frustration” (1972), in The Voice of Liberal Learning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

Forty-three years later, Oakeshott’s words may serve as a strong reply to all efforts to cast education as the acquisition of “skills” for college and the workplace. Is your first-grader “college-ready”?

A related post
Michael Oakeshott on higher education

Door management

I was telling my students about visiting Mystery Pier Books in Los Angeles. Rare books? We didn’t have the money. Should we go in? Would we be welcome? We went in. Boy, were we glad that we did.

My advice to my students: when you come to a door, open it. Go through it. Unless the door says “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” or something like that. Don’t open that door.

Visiting Mystery Pier Books is a Thing to Do in Los Angeles.

[That’s John Ciardi’s translation of Dante. And yes, my advice echoes Yogi Berra’s “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”]

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Another college president plagiarizing? Come on, folks, let’s move along. Nothing to see here, folks.

A little invective in the morning

[From the First Folio (1623), Brandeis University. Click for a larger, more insulting view.]

William Shakespeare, King Lear, act 2, scene 2, Kent speaking to Oswald. Kent has said, “Fellow I know thee.” Oswald, feigning innocence, asks, “What do’st thou know me for?” Dig the phrasal adjectives in Kent’s reply:

A Knaue, a Rascall, an eater of broken meates, a base, proud, shallow, beggerly, three-suited-hundred pound, filthy woosted-stocking knaue, a Lilly-liuered, action-taking, whoreson glasse-gazing super-seruiceable finicall Rogue, one Trunke-inheriting slaue, one that would’st be a Baud in way of good seruice, and art nothing but the composition of a Knaue, Begger, Coward, Pandar, and the Sonne and Heire of a Mungrill Bitch, one whom I will beate into clamours whining, if thou deny’st the least sillable of thy addition.

I think my favorite Shakespearean insult (as of 6:18 this morning) might be one that soon follows. It, too, is from Kent to Osawald: “Thou whoreson Zed, thou unnecessary letter.”

A Google search for shakespearean insult generator will turn up many chances to assemble some invective of your own. Here’s an especially nice generator.

Ben Leddy rocks the world

Our son the musical geographer. He previously rocked the fifty states.

Terry Eagleton on “the hot pursuit of the student purse”

Terry Eagleton, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education on “The Slow Death of the University.” Here he addresses institutions’ willingness to see students as customers:

One result of this hot pursuit of the student purse is the growth of courses tailored to whatever is currently in fashion among 20-year-olds. In my own discipline of English, that means vampires rather than Victorians, sexuality rather than Shelley, fanzines rather than Foucault, the contemporary world rather than the medieval one. It is thus that deep-seated political and economic forces come to shape syllabuses. Any English department that focused its energies on Anglo-Saxon literature or the 18th century would be cutting its own throat.

In the same issue of the Chronicle, an article about video trailers for college courses.

[N.B. (as we say in academia): Both articles are behind the paywall.]

Milwaukee bus passes

From CityLab, a chronicle of Milwaukee bus passes. The paper passes will soon give way to an electronic fare system. Flickr has Kindra Murphy’s pass collection, 1930–1979. Says Murphy, “The colors are insane!”

O dowdy world, that had such bus passes in it.

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Henry at the shoe repairman Now with shoe booths, real ones.